Western Digital has announced the arrival of new VelociRaptor hard drives. The drives will be available in 450GB and 600GB capacities and will feature 6Gb/s SATA connections.

For the last few years Western Digital has held the performance crown in for SATA hard drives. Their 10,000RPM Raptor drives and then the VelociRaptor (which was still 10K but moved to a 2.5-inch form-factor) have been popular with enthusiasts, but they have lost some of their appeal recently. While performance is still strong for a SATA drive they don’t have the capacity of other hard drives (300GB compared to 2TB) and they don’t have the advantages found in a solid-state disk.

Unlike the original release of the VelociRaptor, the new models are available with or without the Ice Pack, a metal heatsink that converts the 2.5-inch to a 3.5-inch one. This helps cooling and it give the drive a desktop-friendly size. The 2.5-inch models will be aimed at servers and the enterprise while the 3.5-inch models will find their way into workstations and high-end desktops.

Features (from the release):

Killer speed – SATA 6 Gb/s interface and 32 MB cache enhance the next generation 10,000 RPM WD VelociRaptor making it up to 15% faster than the award-winning previous generation.

Monstrous capacity – WD VelociRaptor SATA drives are available in capacities up to 600 GB, double the capacity of the previous generation.

Rock-solid reliability – Designed and manufactured to mission-critical enterprise-class standards to provide enterprise reliability in high duty cycle environments. With 1.4 million hours MTBF, these drives have the highest available reliability rating on a high capacity SATA drive.

Ultra-cool operation – Consumes no more power than the previous generation WD VelociRaptor while offering double the capacity and higher performance.

Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward (RAFF) –Optimizes operation and performance when the drives are used in vibration-prone, multi-drive chassis.

NoTouch ramp load technology – The recording head never touches the disk media ensuring significantly less wear to the recording head and media as well as better drive protection in transit.

Environmentally conscious – In addition to being ROHS compliant, this generation of WD VelociRaptor is also a halogen-free design.

So WD is touting a 15% performance gain, in addition to the increased capacities. This won’t match the performance of today’s better SSDs under most conditions, but users are getting good performance at a much larger capacity than today’s solid-state offerings.

The WD VelociRaptor 450GB (WD4500HLHX) sells for $299 and the 600GB (WD6000HLHX) is $329. The 2.5-inch models currently appear to be OEM-only, but the 3.5-inch models are available now.